Law School’s Acceptance of GRE Test Scores Provokes Tussle

The legal profession’s gatekeepers engaged in a fierce debate this week after an Arizona law school began accepting applicants who had taken only the more general GRE graduate admissions exam instead of the traditional Law School Admissions Test.

The University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law announced the new test policy in February, opening its doors to a larger pool of applicants. That decision prompted a scolding by the Law School Admissions Council, the nonprofit entity that oversees the law school applications process. The council warned in an April 4 letter that it might expel Arizona’s school from its network, which would send a strong signal to law schools that they need to play by the established rules.

On Wednesday, some 150 law school deans, including Martha Minow from Harvard and Robert Post from Yale, lined up to support Arizona. In a letter to the council’s president, Daniel Bernstine, the deans argued that “experimentation benefits all of us,” and said that kicking out Arizona “is unwarranted under the existing rules and sends a terrible message to law schools about experimentation in the admissions process.”

The council has significant clout in the legal profession because it oversees the administration of the LSAT and the common application process used by tens of thousands of people when they apply to any of the 206 law schools accredited by the American Bar Association.

Last month, the council told Arizona’s law school that “substantially all” of its member students take the LSAT, and suggested that to ignore that practice could jeopardize the school’s membership.

The tussle highlights a growing frustration in legal academia. Some law school deans, grappling with an overall drop in enrollment, view the standardized test as an impediment to their reaching new groups of potential applicants who could become law students. The GRE is given by computer and offered frequently during the year. The LSAT, critics say, is less user-friendly because it is a written exam and offered only four times a year.

Kathryn Rubino, an editor at the legal industry blog Above the Law, wrote in a post that the law council “has managed to consolidate quite a bit of the power in the law school admissions game, and they are not looking to share that anytime soon.”

The council issued a statement on Thursday saying it wanted “to emphasize that our inquiry into the University of Arizona Law School was a request for clarification on the law school’s new policy, which we had only learned about through media reports. To characterize this as a ‘threat’ is unfortunate.”

Two months before Arizona decided to accept students with successful scores from either test, it worked with the Educational Testing Service to examine whether GRE test results were a “valid and reliable predictor of students’ first-term law school grades” and, thus, whether the test met the standards set by the bar association, whose section on legal education accredits the country’s law schools. They concluded that the test met the standards.

Marc L. Miller, the dean of Arizona’s law school, said it had received about 30 applications from GRE test-takers, and, so far, has admitted three of them for the class entering this fall. And there could be more.

“We are trying to diversify the paths to legal education, and believe that GRE applicants are as good or better than LSAT applicants,” Mr. Miller said. He said the number of people who take the GRE was five times the number of students who take the LSAT.

Arizona, ranked nationally among the top 50 law schools, has 130 to 135 first-year students, including 30 who are foreign students earning an American juris doctorate. The 100 American students are about evenly split between Arizona residents and nonresidents.

“We would love to get back to 150, the number we had before the downturn,” Mr. Miller said. “But we are not looking to GRE takers for that.

“As the economy changed six or seven years ago, we began changing the makeup of our class to admit international students, many of whom are from Asia. But this move is about diversifying the mix, which worked well for us when we tried it earlier.”

But the dispute could get nasty. Mr. Miller also wrote a letter to the council, noting that curbing the school’s admissions policy could raise antitrust issues. Restrictions on the Arizona school’s actions “unreasonably restrain(s) the competition on law school admissions testing market.”

He said on Thursday that two weeks ago he was worried about how his school would get the services of the Law School Admissions Council. “But after the support from other deans, I don’t see us being left out,” he said.

The council’s board, comprised mainly of law school deans and law professors, will meet Friday at a regularly scheduled board meeting, according to spokeswoman Wendy Margolis.

“We can assure our members, and everyone in the law school community, that we are taking all perspectives into account as we consider these issues,” the council’s statement said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: The GRE for Law School? A Gatekeeper Has Qualms. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe